IAS Officer Dismissed After a Decade of Unauthorized Leave — He Was Working at Microsoft

This is a retelling, in our own words, of the story reported by the Indian press in July 2012.

In an unusual move, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) removed from service a Maharashtra cadre IAS officer who had been on unauthorized leave for over a decade — and was working with software giant Microsoft in the United States.

In its order dated July 9, the DoPT dismissed L.V. Nilesh, a 1991-batch officer, after concluding that he had remained absent from duty without authorization for more than ten years. During that period, he had built a career in the American software industry while still technically on the rolls of the Indian Administrative Service.

Dismissal from the IAS is rare. The service's disciplinary machinery is famously slow, and officers who go on extended leave — for study, deputation, or personal reasons — sometimes stretch those absences for years before the system catches up. Nilesh's case was extreme even by those standards: a full decade of unauthorized absence, during which the officer in question had simply moved on to a different life.

The episode fed the perennial debate about the IAS's personnel management — whether the service's protections, designed to shield officers from political vendettas, had become a shield for absenteeism as well. For every officer working punishing hours in a district posting, the Nilesh case was a reminder that the system's accountability mechanisms had gaps wide enough to lose a person through for ten years.